Regarding Pooh

We thank the letter writers for their interest in our article1 and for taking the time to write. We appreciate that Julie Downs looked for a deeper meaning in our piece. She assumes that we think people who are quirky actually could use some psychoactive medication to make them normal, but this was not the point we intended to make. Rather, we were attempting to poke fun at ourselves as modern neurodevelopmentalists who are at risk of seeing pathology everywhere and who feel driven to apply our particular vision of the world to everyone, real or fictional, human or animal. We, too, value a society that tolerates difference. We also acknowledge Downs' concern about our comments regarding Kanga's future. We would point out that we did also indicate that Kanga might end up with an MBA and turn the Hundred Acre Wood into a gated community. Nonetheless, it was not our intention to offend and we apologize to any fictional single kangaroo mothers who have felt stereotyped.

We enjoyed very much the letter from Leslie Blumenberg, although we have to point out that none of us are psychiatrists. We are also not psychologists, which some other readers seemed to assume. We had not considered thyroid dysfunction as a possibility and agree that this could be a factor. However, we shudder collectively at the image of Tigger with diarrhea.

The letter from JoAnn Schuh also offers a valuable additional perspective on possible medical disorders contributing to the dysfunction of the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood. She chides us for practising veterinary medicine without a licence. We wish to assure our readers that we felt justified in our activities because we were using a poetic licence.

We had not heard of the work of Karl Anschaaung so kindly brought to our attention by Stephen Black. We did not scurry out to get a copy of The Pooh Perplex, although we did scurry to the dictionary to discover that skoptophilia is the derivation of sexual pleasure from looking at another's genital organs. As we could not recall any of the creatures in the Hundred Acre Wood having these, we were left feeling confused and more than a little weirded out.

We can only say thank you to Joan Hoffman for her kind letter. Shared humour can certainly enrich the patient–physician relationship. Finally, we are delighted to learn that our piece has been added to the learning tools for Dennis Coles' class and, naturally, think he and his students are also quite brilliant.